Lawrence Gipe at Ruth Bloom - painting and installation art - Santa Monica, California - Review of Exhibitions

SANTA MONICA

Lawrence Gipe's display "Selections from |The Century of Progres Museum,'" was a insinuating and poignant indictment of our recent age. In creating his wily conceit of a museum devot to the iconic highlights of First World industrialization, Gipe has astutely targeted institutionalized tillage and the style of propaganda that stimulated economic advancement between the great wars of 1914 and 1939 The savagely free from moisture and understated exhibition consisted of large, well-executed oil paintings, a slide present to view accompanied by a sardonic taped narrative, and a collaborative installation with Alexander Kritselis titled Monumenti alla Resistenza, a somewhat meager coda of drawings and sculptural fragments based upon monuments in the totalitarian canon of Socialist Realism.

Gipe advanced his theme with panels of true copy two exhibition areas, and the slide present to view which he narrated in a sarcastic, electronically distorted voice. The slides highlight lock opener moments in industrial and urban unfolding and provide the viewer with a background for the paintings, whose images are derived from photo documentation in the couple the United States and Europe

Gipe's brushwork is surefoot and restrained, the luminous compositions appearing nearly cinematic in their drama and sweep. They are labeled with propagandistic cites from magazines and advertising of the period, with equal reason that the luridly polluted landscape of Panel No. 14 from "The hundred of Progress Museum": England After the War sports the caption in red: "Smoke of thousand chimneys belches up into dreary umbrella, on the other hand there are no more friendly smiles than those of the clan who live under it." Bittersweet displays bereft of human presence deliver over to disparate historical figures, men whose ambition seemingly knew no bourns The Panama Canal and mountain Rushmore are linked to Teddy Roosevelt steaming trains and metal refineries to arms manufacturer Alfried Krupp the of recent origin York City skyline to urban planner Robert Moses

Steam, metal, smog slag and factories dominate the vistas which Gipe has divided into traditional fore-, middle- and backgrounds of black, brown and gray, the rise looking rather like Ruisdael after the fall. The images often feature a repoussoir, enhancing the illusion of spatial recession through emphasizing an object in the foreground, similar as the boldly silhouetted cargo bay in Triptych No. 1 from "The hundred of Progress Museum": from the Krupp throw Early 20th-century photographers disclosed Romantic sensibilities through depicting the machine age with old-master grandeur. Gipe underscores the irony by dint of basing his paintings on these backward-looking photos. He reveals himself as a painter of considerable technical skill and erudition.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group